Gulf Of Mexico, Gulf Oil Spill | featured news

BP said today its attempt to place a new cap on its ruptured undersea well was proceeding as planned. But while robots replace the old cap, crude is flowing freely.

The federal official leading the Gulf oil spill cleanup said Friday a new containment cap and an additional ship collecting oil could effectively contain the spill in the next three days.

As engineers bore deeper into the seafloor toward the source of the oil still spewing into the Gulf of Mexico, BP PLC is growing more confident that the relief well it expects to complete in August will succeed where all previous efforts to contain or kill the gusher have failed.

But what if it doesn't work?

At the very least, oil would continue to spill while workers try something else.

That proposition would surely bring more misery for the people who live, work and play along the shores from Louisiana to Florida.

Tests on a supertanker adapted to skim large quantities of oily water from the surface of the Gulf of Mexico are inconclusive because of high seas, ship owner TMT Shipping Offshore said on Monday.

BP says that it has now spent more than $3 billion in attempts to stop an oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico and to settle damage claims.

Washington was preparing a revised offshore oil drilling moratorium and cleanup efforts in the Gulf of Mexico returned to normal on Friday after hurricane Alex passed through the region without doing major damage.

The first named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season was on track on Saturday to reach the Gulf of Mexico within days, a potential threat to containment and cleanup of the worst ever US oil spill.

The Coast Guard says BP has been forced to remove a cap that was containing some of the oil gushing into the gulf.

Massachusetts Rep. Ed Markey releases an internal BP document that shows leak could spew far more oil into the Gulf of Mexico than has been estimated in public accounts.

BP officials said that Tony Hayward, their embattled C.E.O., was still in charge of all BP operations despite comments indicating that he was relinquishing his duties in the Gulf of Mexico.